Marc ten Bosch

Miegakure is a platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles.
Our world is three-dimensional: width, depth, and height. But what if there was a fourth physical dimension that we cannot see, in addition to the other three?

4D Toys is a box of toys from the fourth dimension.
It turns out the rules of how objects bounce, slide, fall, spin and roll around can be generalized to any number of dimensions, and this toy lets you experience what that would look like.

A talk in collaboration with Jonathan Blow
Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions lead? By inspecting the structure of a system in this way, we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe.

We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in general.

A musical painting experience from one hundred miles above the earth. A continually evolving musical score underlies the creation of realistic cloud and land formations. Less of a game, more an experience that is meant to be savored.
5 person team including an artist and a composer.

PrometheusZ

September 2008 - January 2009

Puzzle

Innovative Cooperative Shoot'em up. 1 person team / 3 months.
PrometheusZ is a vertical shooter with a unique gameplay mechanic that gives it puzzle-like aspects.
In PrometheusZ you can shoot a beam of light that attaches itself to certain spots on enemies and environments. You can use it to attack from the side or the back, grab onto/pull/spin other ships, destroy bullets and much more.

Two different methods of restricting the number of colors used to draw a certain image, while preserving detail in salient regions.
In both methods, images are segmented based on saliency
data, assigning larger regions to less salient areas of the image, and
filling each region with its mean color. (With Jae Lee, S.)

Hardware silhouette detection and rendering.
I implement and extend Morgan McGuire and John F. Hughes's Hardware-Determined Feature Edges, and introduce the notion of a "partial silhouette".
Using the default algorithm, as the scene changes, different contour edges are identified, creating an unpleasant "popping" effect. To remedy this, I transform the discrete version of the XOR into a continuous version.

I borrow the concept of a stencil volume from shadow volumes and apply it to the simulation of a fluid spreading on a surface, without resorting to a texture-based approach. I introduce stencil paint volumes that grow in real-time using a physically-based system.
Points inside the paint volumes are rendered in color, and those outside in black-and-white.

Photon mapping is an extension of ray tracing that can handle Caustics and Diffuse Interreflection (Color Bleeding).
Ray tracing using Local and global illumination models, reflection and refraction using Fresnel equations, shadows of transparent objects, and more...

At DigiPen, CS460 is divided into 4 coding projects: Skeletal animation; Path following and motion blending; Inverse Kinematics; and finally Rigid Body Dynamics. Subjects such as animation file formats, quaternions (interpolation, splines), and Catmull-Rom splines (my favorite kind :) ), are covered in the process.
I was also the TA for the class, where I lectured about importing data from animation file formats, making an exporter for 3D Studio MAX, and other topics.

Character and animation editor for Crimson Legend.
Our goal was to create a 2D fighting game that did not require us to draw each individual frame of animation. We decided to design a 2D skeletal animation system, similar to what is done in 3D animation and modeling package such as Maya, but in 2D.